4K for me as a developer means that I can have a couple of source files and a browser with the API documentation open at the same time. I reckon I could use legitimately use an 8K screen - get a terminal window or two open as well, keep an eye on builds and deployments while I’m working on a ticket.
Now yes - gaming and watching video at 8K. That’s phenomenally niche, and very much a case of diminishing returns. But some of us have to work for a living as well, alas, and would like them pixels.
Speaking as a developer; I’ve a 4K screen which is amazing for having loads of source files open at the same time, and also works for old or undemanding games. Glorious Eggroll’s version of Proton has all the FSR patches in it, so you can ‘upscale anything’. Almost any modern game, I’m going to be running at lower resolution, usually either 1440p or the slightly odd 2954 x 1662. Generally, highest-quality graphics and upscaling looks better than medium-quality native to me, for games where I have to compromise.
I would be interested in an 8K display for coding, as long as the price is reasonable. I’m not spending five grand, that would be crazy. But I’d still be upscaling for playing games, as basically no GPU could drive that many pixels.
Open to abuse, unfortunately. If even the most trivial of cases takes a week to resolve, then you could shut any company down by filling fifty suits.
The real solution would be for the judge to actually do their job and to penalise companies for doing that kind of bullshit.
Exactly this. I needed a day return on short notice the last time I had to take a flight for a funeral, so that would be business price for tickets rather than leisure price. About 10x price difference, but there was no alternative if I was going to be there.
Was expecting it to be “vodka without beer is just waste of money”, in that case.
Looking it up, most sources seem to have it the other way around - “beer without vodka”, as in there’s no point wasting money on drinking unless you’re going to do some hard drinking?
I am intrigued. Most of the cultures I’d expect to have that proverb have neither definite nor indefinite articles in their language.
I actually find that starting a ‘raw disk partition’ virtual machine for Windows is one of the best ways to run it. Stops it from fucking up your BIOS and EFI when it does an update. You can restart into it when you want the ‘native GPU’ for games.
Of course, the even better way to stop Windows from fucking up your hardware is to not allow it anywhere near your hardware in the first place…
The Android dev kit includes a copy of QEMU that’s set up to emulate ARM with a selection of popular screen sizes and revisions of the OS, so that you can test your app on a variety of ‘potential phones’ before you upload it to the marketplace. Snapdragons are amazingly performant CPUs for how gently they sip at the battery, but they’re not that strong in the big scheme of things - any random x86 processor should be able to emulate them while using fifty times the power. A Steam deck ought to be able to do it; the request will then be ‘we’d like to play Android games better’, which to me is a much more reasonable ask.
Doggy paddle is not a very efficient stroke. When will cats learn?
I’m still trying to make ‘sloppers’ happen. Perfectly describes the lack of thought that goes into what they produce.
The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don’t want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like “at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page”. But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.
Would have been even better if we’d got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There’s no reason that computers can’t render beautiful text, but it’s rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.
I’ve used “Linux for work” and “Windows for gaming” for a long time, about twenty years now. Got fed up with Windows shitting itself on a regular basis, and made myself a new year’s resolution to try Linux-only gaming for a bit, see if it would work for me, and I never went back. That was in 2021, and it’s just been getting better and better.
Linux Mint has always been an easy install, and putting Steam on top to get Proton is pretty trivial. A few things have made an amazing difference:
installing the official NVidia drivers used to be a pain in the arse. Download them, stop your display manager, blacklist Nouveau, install them from the command line, restart and hope for the best. Awful. I’ve gone fully AMD, but I understand they’re pretty much a non-issue now.
Proton keeps getting better and better. Seriously, they fix compatibility with about 99% of the games that were broken every year, basically everything runs now. Maybe leave off buying anything with a tech-demo engine for a week, and accept that you won’t be playing stuff with certain anti-cheat, and it’s all good.
DXVK gets overlooked, but it’s amazing. Basically frame-for-frame with Windows on every game, and on some it’s better as it fixes intrusive stutter by precompiling. Can’t argue with that.
That’s why I like make basic grammatical mistakes, speling erors, and include a few fucks in my internet writing. Nobody’s not gona mistake me for no got dagned robot.
Well, we’ve a single cable coming over from France that makes up about 3% (I think) of our total electricity supply. So “French Nuclear” should be a bigger entry in that table than coal, solar, hydro or bio. That’s not the only import, either, so it’s not completely impractical for the missing percentages to be imports.
You can only store rational numbers as a ratio of two numbers, and there’s infinitely times more irrational numbers than rational ones - as soon as you took (almost any) root or did (most) trigonometry, then your accurate ratio would count for nothing. Hardcore maths libraries get around this by keeping the “value in progress” as an expression for as long as possible, but working with expressions is exceptionally slow by computer standards - takes quite a long time to keep them in their simplest form whenever you manipulate them.
If it’s a Robin Hood story, then presumably it’s full of gold coins rather than dollar bills. Bag’s about the size of his head, call it four litres. Gold has a density about 20 kg / litre and is worth about $100 / gram, so ignoring the fact that you’d struggle to lift that bag, especially in one hand, it would be worth about $8M.
Still works out to about 0% of their wealth. Time to start taxing the rich.
We measure Right Ascension from the first point of Aries, which is the March equinox and one of the two times where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator. (The other being the September equinox, of course.) That’s easier to determine with a telescope than peri-/aphelion, and more meaningful to people on Earth. Might suggest that as new year, and then we won’t upset the sun either?
Yeah, I was pondering this earlier. In exchange for giving up quite a lot of the CPU die, you can have some NPU functionality instead; rather than having to offload everything to the cloud, you can preprocess some of it first, and then offload it.
Speech-to-text and text-to-speech plus general battery efficiency are reasonable use cases for a phone, certainly more so than a laptop and much more so than a desktop. But as you note, those models are going to be small, and RAM and backing storage on phones tends to be slow and limited.
Was also considering that an NPU gives no benefit at all unless code has been written for it; it’s a bastard to write code for something so concurrent, and giving up CPU die for an NPU instead of more cores and cache means that your phone will generally be slower unless it’s largely used for NPU tasks. Plus if you need to offload to the cloud for most useful tasks anyway, it’s just a marketing gimmick that makes your phone less good for most uses.
The app that you’ve always wanted, or at least, close enough so that you can tweak it and maybe submit a PR! Except of course that it’s written in .NET and uses WinForms for its UI. Bastards.
In some ways, I’m a bit envious of Windows for having a standardised UI toolkit, even if it’s terrible. Linux has a selection that are each flawed in their own way. I think the last time I enjoyed writing UI code was on the Amiga 1200, and that wasn’t yesterday.